“God send that the reader may be able to imagine some small part of what it was like, for after all there is a great gulf between those who suffer and those who observe suffering from afar.”

–Survivor of a shipwreck of the fleeing Spanish Armada, 1588, quoted in David Howarth, The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story, p. 207.

I feel an article stirring from that quote. …